


Running From Exclusion

by gaydisastereatingbread (GasterFan5)



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Depressed Vanya Hargreeves, Excluded, Gen, How Do I Tag, I Don't Even Know, OOC, Reginald is a bitch, Running Away, Vanya Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Vanya Hargreeves-centric, Vehicle Incident
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:40:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27155362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GasterFan5/pseuds/gaydisastereatingbread
Summary: Vanya has been excluded from everything for as long as she can remember. And honestly? She's pretty sick of it. So she packs what little shit she has and leaves.(bad summary lol)or, me deciding I like my old account and pretending this fic was always here--
Kudos: 24





	1. The Day She Left. . .

Vanya sits on a rough stone ledge, her feet dangling off its edge as she looks at the beautiful night sky, observing all of the stars and making up constellations of her siblings. She’s doing it quietly, for she knows if one of her family members finds out, they won’t be happy. (For once, she’s actually happy to be left alone.) But even with her being quiet, that doesn’t stop anyone from coming up here.

The door to the rooftop creaks open, the heavy metal dragging on the cement and making an unpleasant scraping sound. She knows someone is there, but she doesn’t bother to turn around until they call her name.

“Vanya? What are you doing out here?!” Allison asks, clearly both shocked and angry. “Great, now I have to bring you back inside and waste ten minutes,” she mutters, assuming Vanya doesn’t hear it. She starts walking towards her, but Vanya spins around and looks at her with the meanest glare she could muster. Her eyes are rimmed with silver and black pools in her eyes, like thick, ugly tears. They spill onto the floor. Then she smiles, a big, wide grin, and holds up her violin, starting to play. Allison and Luther fall backward into the house once more–

She wakes up, hands twitching, feeling for the violin she didn’t have in her hands. She frowns, wondering why she seemed so malicious in her dream. She always had powers in her dreams, but, usually, she would be fighting with them…Still, she only has a second to contemplate this, for she starts to hear the others wake up and complain about the newest mission. Sometimes she wishes they wouldn’t complain about it, especially because she never got to go, but she would never tell them this. Vanya drags herself out of bed and follows them to the door like usual, smiling, frowning, and wishing them good luck.

Only this time, she feels differently. They give her looks of annoyance, like usual, but it really bothers her this time, and she’s not sure why. (There’s only so much hate she can take, she supposes.)

It’s been a couple of hours and she’s sitting on a stool playing her violin, attempting to drown out the world as well as her feelings–lord knows she doesn’t want them. She’s playing random notes stranded together when she hears the front door open. Giddy to see her siblings again, she sets her violin down gently and races down the stairs.

She finds everyone looking a little dead inside, but she doesn’t notice how upset everyone is until it’s too late. “Hey! How did the mission go?”

Five snorts, shaking his head. “Oh, Vanya. You know that asking these questions isn’t going to help,” he spits out.

“What do you mean?” she asks, furrowing her eyebrows and taking a confused glance around the room. But he doesn’t reply. It goes quiet for a few tense seconds before–

“You’re lucky! You should be grateful!” one of them says, taking a step towards her and jabbing a finger. “Instead you come out and start talking to us like, like–” Klaus can’t even finish the sentence before tears start streaming down his face. He sniffles and runs to his room.

It’s only now that she realizes Ben is missing. “Where’s–”

“Gone,” Five interrupts, looking down at his feet sorrowfully. Then he walks away like she’s litter he doesn’t want to see anymore. Everyone else stands around awkwardly before Allison pulls Luther to her room. Diego stares at her for a couple of seconds before he too sighs and retreats to his room.

She’s standing alone in the middle of the living room, tears brimming in her eyes, but she refuses to let them fall. Instead, she wipes them away and stares off into the distance.

. . .

The funeral is quiet. Reginald doesn’t say much about Ben; it’s only a couple of sentences until he starts ranting to them that they were terrible for letting Ben die. She doesn’t know how he died, but she does know there’s no way that’s true. So when he leaves them there she says, “This wasn’t any of your faults.”

Someone glares at her. “Oh yeah? How would you know?! You weren’t even there!”

Tears fall from her eyes but she doesn’t feel anything. She doesn’t want anyone to see her crying, though, so she runs off.

When she successfully reaches her room, she starts thinking. They’re right about it; she doesn’t know anything. She wishes she did know. They were right about a lot of things, actually. And on any other day, she’d be sad about it, but right now she’s sick of being left out, and she’s sick of everyone saying that her life was so much better, so she drags out her violin case from under her bed. She opens it up, revealing a parking ticket, a few foreign coins, a rock, and a paperclip. Tears streaming down her face, she stuffs her violin into it and hides it again. She’ll need to find supplies before she leaves.

. . .

The next day, when the rest of the family is off on a mission, she goes hunting for supplies. She finds an empty suitcase in Ben’s room–which she only half regrets taking from him–, a wallet in mom’s old purse with money, and she finally snatches a few snacks that she was never allowed to have. Doritos look interesting.

Vanya retreats to her room and pulls the case out again. She opens the glossy black suitcase and folds a blanket onto one side. Her violin case goes in, then the wallet, then the snacks, then her stupid pills and a water bottle. She hides everything with a couple of identical shirts and zips it up before sliding the whole thing under her bed. She wants to say goodbye before she goes.

. . .

The next mission is coming up. She knows this because everyone’s getting ready to leave (they’re always pretty loud, even with missing a member). Vanya follows them to the door with a sad smile. She wishes them good luck and says goodbye. It sounds like she’s just waiting for them to come back, especially because they couldn’t give two shits about it. Well, Diego and Klaus at least give her a halfhearted smile, but it doesn’t feel like anything anymore.

They leave without looking back, and she sighs. She sulks back to her room. She waits a few minutes before grabbing the suitcase and climbs out of her window without looking back.


	2. Understanding Loneliness

It’s been a couple of hours of walking, and Vanya finally allows herself to take a look around. She’s in the next town over–she assumes; she’s only ever been out a handful of times–and nobody seems to recognize her. She notices a clothesline between two apartment buildings, where someone was waiting for their clothes to air-dry. She doesn’t see anyone, so she grabs the white sweater and a pair of soft pants and quickly puts them on. The sweater is baggy, and so are the pants, but not in a way that they’d fall off of her. She keeps her shoes on and decides the next step is to make her a little less recognizable. She knows her money should be kept for food, especially now that she counted and it’s only $43. So she goes into the clothing store across the street and buys a 7-dollar black baseball cap that has “TUA’S BIGGEST FAN” written across it. It’s not a lie.

Vanya stuffs it on her head backward and sits down on an ugly, cold bench and tries to get some sleep. Lord knows she won’t be sleeping at night.

. . .

She wakes up with a small gasp, eyes opening wide, and she looks around for people. There’s nobody there, though. She sighs, taking one of her anxiety pills, and watches the stars for a little while to try and calm down.

. . .

It’s been a month, one week, and two days since Ben died. Klaus claims he can see Ben, but so far nobody’s believed him. Diego glances at the two empty seats at the table and feels like he’s forgetting something. It’s only when Grace places oatmeal in front of him for breakfast that he remembers.

“Where’s Vanya?” he asks. This causes Reginald to look up from his morning papers and glance at her seat as well.

“She wasn’t feeling well this morning, so I put her in quarantine again,” he lies. He doesn’t want to just accept that Vanya’s missing, but he also doesn’t want anyone to know that she was a part of the Academy, either, because a) that would break him and b) it’d make any child assume they could join if they were born that day. Lord knows he doesn’t need any more godforsaken children. She was useless anyway, he tries.

Diego accepts the answer, but something still feels…wrong…about it.

. . .

Luther makes a face. “I don’t know, guys, I don’t want to get in trouble..” he mumbles, frowning.

“Oh come on, you never come with us!” Klaus counters, whisper-shouting at him.

“Yeah, and what’s so much fun about sleeping?” Five asks, narrowing his eyes challengingly.

Luther looks between the both of them before, finally, he nods. “Alright, fine.” The two of them cheer and he laughs as they climb out of the window and make their way to the donut shop.

. . .

It takes a couple of minutes for them to find it, but once they do Allison rumors the waiter into giving them their order for free. They sit down at a booth (Allison and Luther on one side, Klaus and Ben on the other) and start talking when the door opens. The bell chimes beautifully and a younger-looking girl comes in and sits at the booth right in front of theirs.

The three of them are too into the conversation to notice, but Ben–always observant as he is–does. He climbs over to the other booth and watches her. She has a large suitcase that looked identical to his situated beside her, and long brown hair hidden under a baseball cap. Her clothes don’t fit right and that’s what bothers him. Ben leans over and looks into her eyes. They make eye contact for a second and he immediately recognizes her, even with the bruises littering her face and the black eye.

“K-Klaus?” he asks nervously, turning around to face the one person who could see him.

“What’s up?” he replies, looking at him with dilated pupils. Ben nods to the girl in the other booth and he squints.

“I think it’s—”

Before he could reply, Vanya’s eyes widen–recognizing the people in the other booth–and she immediately leaves the shop.

. . .

“What?!” Five nearly drops his coffee cup. Luther shushes him, panickedly looking around to make sure Reginald didn’t hear, who was currently in his office.

“I said, Klaus saw Vanya outside yesterday. We think…we think…” he mumbles the rest.

“S-say it again?” Diego asks.

“I said we think that she…ran away,” he repeats. Everyone at the table looks stunned.

“How do you know it was her?” Luther asks. Oh Luther, always needing proof. It goes quiet for a few seconds.

“Well first off, I haven’t seen her in a while, and Ben says that she has his suitcase,” Klaus replies confidently. The six of them race to Ben’s room and, sure enough, his travel suitcase is gone.

“But why would she leave?” Allison questions, looking around the table.

“I…don’t know,” Klaus whispers. None of them do. It goes quiet again.

“That’s not really important right now,” Five comments, breaking the silence. “We need to find her.”

. . .


	3. Another Way

Vanya bursts through the large automatic doors, feeling like Klaus as she runs as fast as her legs will carry her with a tuna sandwich in her hands. She turns the corner and continues down the winding alleyways for another few minutes before deeming it safe to stop–not like she could continue running, anyway; her lungs were _burning_.

She leans against the closest brick building, heart racing, and tries to catch her breath. It’s been about a week since she spotted Klaus, Five, and Luther at the donut shop and made a run for it. Since then, she came in contact with Allison once at a clothes store and Diego at a gas station, but neither of them saw her thankfully.

Still, she had a feeling they noticed she was gone.

She sighs, pushing herself off the wall and looking around warily. She hasn’t taken into account where exactly she was running to. Still, for once, she has something to eat, so she decides to scarf that down pretty quickly before thinking about where she is.

After finishing her—what is it? Lunch?—she takes inventory. She ran out of pills today, which has been making her feel pretty strange; everything’s so much louder than before, and (unbeknownst to her) she’s going to start to suffer withdrawal if she doesn’t find more. Not only that, but she was also fresh out of money and (as per usual) super lonely.

Then, Vanya looks around. She spots a familiar large, looming apartment and doesn’t believe it’s there. But as she watches the house she knows she somehow made it back to her childhood home (childhood? Hell, she’s still a child). Horrified, she backs away from the looming building.

Right into the dirty city street behind the alleyway.

Right into the terrible traffic of a Friday afternoon.

She doesn’t notice that she wound up in the middle of the road, but the cars sure do. They start honking louder than ever, and now her head hurts. Vanya turns to look at the cars almost right before one bumps into her. It doesn’t run her over, but she feels extreme pain, and she also fell onto the ground and knocked out.

. . .

She wakes up with a massive headache, which isn’t really a surprise, and discerns that she’s no longer on the road. Thankfully, her brain still works, and she guesses whoever hit her must’ve dragged her away. _But they still drove off,_ she notes grimly. She tries standing and, though she’s a bit shaky, she can manage.

One of her knees is cut up thanks to the gravel she fell on, and she knows there’s a handful of bruises on her arms and stomach. _I need to get something for that,_ she thinks, surveying the area. She spots a gas station pretty quickly and heads over.

It’s only when she’s walking that she realizes how much of a pain this whole walking thing is going to be; maybe it wasn’t just a cut-up knee. She decides that she’ll steal what she thinks she needs and determine what’s wrong later.

So she marches on, pushing the smaller double-door open and immediately heads to the back. She’s been here before; in fact, the few times she ever left the house she usually went here because it was so close. She knows exactly where everything is in here. Just like…yes, that’s the bandages, there are the painkillers, Neosporin…She grabs a thing of gauze, an adult bottle of Advil (they work better), and the Neosporin, as well as a few other things.

Vanya sighs loudly, which goes unnoticed. It’s not a surprise, though, because there was only one other person in the store right now. She’s getting really tired of stealing stuff. Sure, she was good at it now, but she didn’t really want to do it. She starts to walk down the other isles when she sees a few doodles in the freezer window.

It’s nothing, really: just small smiling stick figures holding hands. But it reminds her of her family and she can’t help but tear up. God, she misses them _so much_. But they didn’t want her there, she knows, so even though she did want to see them again (so, so badly) she was going to have to suck it up and deal.

She hears someone talking, but clearly not to her. Starved for human interaction, she turns to look at them and, maybe, watch their conversation.

It’s only then that she realizes it’s Klaus. He’s talking to…well, he says Ben a few times, so she’s assuming it’s him because nobody’s there (that she can see).

She goes quiet, practically freezes. She knows in the state she’s in she can’t run away from him. He’s laughing and searching through the alcohol freezer. _He doesn’t seem to miss me at all,_ she thinks, her heart breaking. Sure, she expected it, but a small part of her thought that just maybe someone would care. Sniffling, she turns around and goes back to the medical aisle.

. . .

Ben hears something besides Klaus, for once. He hears someone else in the store, so he looks around. Walking away from Klaus, he spots someone in the aisle with all of the medicine. Tears are falling down the young girl’s face, but she barely makes a sound. It’s now that Klaus realizes Ben’s missing and appears in the aisle to find him standing there, hand out to comfort Vanya, but seemingly frozen in place.

Klaus nearly drops his bottle of alcohol when he sees her. Or, well, when he recognizes her.

Her hair is long, yet she put most of it under a “TUA’S Biggest Fan” cap. Her clothes don’t fit her at all, either, and he can already see visible bruises on her face and how skinny she is.

“Vanya?” he whisper-asks. She stiffens before turning to face him. Heavy bags line her eyes and one of them is swollen shut. She looks like she wants to run, but, for some reason, she doesn’t. She just…stands there. He walks over to her and gives her a hug, frowning at how she flinches away from his hands. But then she leans into it and he knows she’ll come home with him.

. . .

He carries her home and sets her down gently on the couch, settling down beside her. Nobody else is awake at the moment. They sit in silence for a few moments before Vanya takes the stuff Klaus bought for her out and starts getting to work on her cut knee, and a few other scrapes she’s had for a while.

He just watches for a few seconds in silence before speaking up. “What happened?”

“Ran into a car,” she whispers, shrugging like it wasn’t really that important. Klaus knows not to make a big deal out of it, so instead, he just hugs her.

“What made you leave?”

“I’d rather answer that in front of everyone than say it twice,” she replies, finishing up with the supplies and setting them down on the coffee table. He figures this is fair and lets her sleep till the morning.

. . .

When morning finally arrives, Klaus is fast asleep on the couch and Vanya is staring out the window with a small frown. She doesn’t tell him she’s awake. The only reason he does wake up is when Diego slinks downstairs, spots her, and practically runs over to her–then he yells for the others to come down. She winces but it goes unseen.

Five minutes later, everyone is awake and staring at her like any second she’ll vanish again. It’s all fine until they start asking questions.

“Why did you leave?” was the first one, asked by, unsurprisingly, Five. He was terrible at reading the room.

“I guess I just…” she hesitates. Then, she sighs and tries again. “You all always frowned at me, gave me looks…excluded me. And I guess I just figured you didn’t need me here.”

“No…no. I–we–were just trying to protect you. I’m sorry…” Allison starts, giving her a big hug that made her flinch just a little bit.

“What happened to your face?” was the second one. “I got mugged,” she replies, looking away uncomfortably.

“Tell me everything.”

And she did.

. . .

The story was sad, sure, but Vanya didn’t think that meant she’d be watched so heavily for the next few days. Sometimes it felt like she couldn’t breathe. But at least she was home, and they were all trying their best to let her in.

She was back on her pills, too, thankfully. Everything felt bland again, but it wasn’t the intolerable, emotional, _real_ world it was for a few days.

And honestly? She couldn’t say she minded being watched; it was better than being ignored, in her opinion.

She smiles warmly when Klaus starts describing some random story at the breakfast table. She wouldn’t trade this for anything, not anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! Sorry to those who got excited only to realize it was the same fanfic as before, haha! I created a new account a little while ago but I decided I didn't like having everything in two spots, and I decided I'd re-post it here. I hope that's okay with you guys...? ^^;


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